Hope, Dreams, Poverty, and The Gospel

Is the gospel just about justification and the future, or does it offer us hope for real life? Does it offer us freedom? One pages 52-53 of The Artisan Soul, Erwin McManus notes the relationship between dreams and freedom. He writes:

“One of the unexpected discoveries during my ten years of working with the urban poor was how poverty changes a person. Not always but far too often, physical poverty drives us to a poverty of the soul. I knew when I walked into a world of impoverishment that I would meet people who lacked food and shelter and education. I knew that I would spend my days with individuals and families who had been deprived of their basic human needs. I knew that centuries of oppression and injustice had robbed them of much of their dignity, opportunity, and freedom. What I didn’t know was that the weight of poverty had stolen from them most of their capacity to imagine a life better than the one they had always known. 

I quickly realized that it was essential for me to do the basic work of helping people solve the real problems of their daily struggle. I needed to help them find a place to live, a job that would pay their bills, and the skills necessary for a better life. But most important, it was critical that I somehow find a way to help these individuals, whom I had come to care so much about, learn to dream again. People only become slaves when they have lost their dreams. I am certain that every master knows this. You may have people in chains, but you don’t own them until you have stolen their souls. If they dream of freedom, your power over them is an illusion. Even Paul makes this nuanced distinction in his letter to the Galatians, when he says that even if the son is an heir, as long as he is a child, he still lives like a slave. Until the voice that guides us declares our freedom, nothing and no one in the world can make us free. As long as the voice that defines who we are declares our freedom, no one and nothing can hold us captive. Which leads to the critical question: What is the narrative that guides us?”

I love the line: “People only become slaves when they have lost their dreams.” That is so true. I have been poor and I have worked among the poor. One of the things I noticed working among the poor is that the main difference between the temporarily poor and the chronically poor is hope.

It is not difficult to endure poverty for a season. I lived for two years on $2.13/hour + tips when I was in graduate school. My life was hard, but I made it because I knew that it was just for a season. Eventually I got married and then graduated and was able to break out of poverty.

But life for the poor can be a vicious, hope-killing cycle. When there is no clear way out of poverty, it is tougher to endure the hardships. It’s natural to turn to drugs, alcohol, or other compulsive behaviors to escape the pain, shame, and anxiety of poverty. These decisions make it harder to escape poverty and the cycle escalates.

One of the most beautiful parts of the gospel to me is the hope that life can be different. Yes, because of the cross, Jesus offers us forgiveness of sins and the hope of resurrection and life with God in the future. But I think we evangelicals can be preoccupied with guilt and forgiveness. The gospel is bigger than that.

My wife and I once visited a woman from my church who was in the hospital for a failed suicide attempt. Because of her situation, she was at risk to lose her kids. Brooke and I sat with her and offered her support, but she turned the conversation to God: “Why did God make me like this?” She asked with tears in her eyes. “I have tried everything and I cannot change. Why would He make me like this?”

At that moment, guilt and shame and forgiveness and heaven and hell were nowhere on her radar. Her kids were all that mattered. All she wanted was to be able to change and live a life that would allow her access to her kids.

Does the gospel have any hope to offer her?

I think it does. Yes, the gospel is about forgiveness, but it’s also about life. Life now. Through the Spirit, God offers us our future life with God in a real but not complete way now. It’s a foretaste of what is to come. We don’t have to be slaves. There is hope for change.

What do you think? How important is hope? What kind of hope do we have through the gospel?  

What Were We Thinking? Radical Together by David Platt

When I was a kid, hair metal ruled. Van Halen, Poison, Twisted Sister—the bigger the hair, the better. If you wanted to be a rocker in the 1980s, tight denim, a shred guitar and a can of Aqua Net were keys to your success. But, like every fad, hair rock gave way to grunge rock, which in turn gave way to something else. Looking back at the androgynous arena superstars of my childhood, I can’t help but ask, “What were we thinking?”

If David Platt is right, another child of the 1980s, the highly-programmed-seeker-sensitive-attractional-mega-church, is also destined for the “What were we thinking?” bin. In his book, Radical Together, Platt argues that current axioms for reaching the lost are actually counter-productive for building the kingdom of God. Shockingly, pouring money into rock-show-quality worship, holographic preachers, and multi-million-dollar campuses isn’t the best way to spread a message of self-sacrifice, service, and love for our neighbor.

What were we thinking?

In Radical Together, Platt expands on the message of his earlier book and applies it to the church. What Radical was to the individual, Radical Together is to the body. Conventional wisdom says that the keys to a healthy growing church are: superstar preachers, state-of-the-art worship technology, professionals at key leadership positions, targeting specific demographics, and keeping the message as simple as possible. Instead, Platt argues that church programs can distract us from the mission, preaching the Word is key to life-change, ministry should be done by everyone, and the mission is to take the Gospel to all nations.

The gold in Platt’s book is his ability to inspire through stories. From his own church’s ability to trim their budget and give $1.5 million to missions in India, to another church’s decision to meet outside and pass $60,000 in annual savings to God’s kingdom, Platt encourages and motivates churches to be radical for the Gospel. You can’t walk away from this book without being challenged to do something big.

The one weakness I see with Radical Together is Platt’s elevation of the Word as the only means of life-change (to the exclusion of the Spirit). Certainly, the Spirit works through the Word to change lives, but the Spirit also gifts the body to minister to one another in ways other than preaching. After all, “If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing?” (1 Corinthians 12:17 ESV) Although he doesn’t say it outright, one gets the feeling that Platt is encouraging churches to cut programs emphasizing incarnational, life-on-life ministry in favor of those that emphasize the preached Word. While not discounting the value of the preached Word, there is also a value to ministries that “merely” involve Christians doing life together.

Hair metal seemed like a good idea at the time. Seriously, it did. So also the seeker-sensitive church seemed like a good idea for a time. But if Radical Together is any indication, church leaders are starting to wake up and return to Jesus’ call to make disciples from all of the nations.

Church Movements and Rhetoric of the Spirit

I'm reading a book on house churches, or what some people might call "liquid churches," "simple churches," or "organic churches." Much of the information is good, but it is difficult for me to get past the authors' language. You'd think it was rebellion to church any other way. Here is a sample of what I am talking about. In talking about the cultural move from large churches to house churches, the authors write:

But it does appear that God is also doing something new. There is no location, no city or town to which one can travel to find the center of this movement. There is no superstar whose conference we can attend. But all across the nation, the Holy Spirit is speaking to His people. And everyone seems to be hearing the same thing: church as we know it has changed. Many believe this current move of God will prove similar in scope and impact to the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Now, I like the philosophy of ministry that the authors are describing. I am drinking the Michael Frost/Alan Hirsch Kool-Aid (with some helpful correctives found in Jim Belcher's Deep Church). But do you see the implications of the above quote? God is doing something new. . . .The Holy Spirit is speaking to His people . . . . [C]hurch as we know it has changed. What, then, of all the faithful followers of Jesus who are not operating according to their philosophy of ministry? Are they not following the Spirit? Is God not speaking to them, or is He keeping His new plans a secret from them?

And why is it that when God is doing something "new," it is always going back to Acts? Why not go back farther? Why doesn't anyone ever say, "God is restoring us to the original church like we saw in 1 Corinthians. There are contentious divisions. People are having sex with their step parents. They're suing each other. They're getting drunk on the communion wine. They're visiting prostitutes, forbidding each other from getting married, and denying the resurrection. It's just like the early church!"

I like the house church movement. But let's keep it in perspective. God works in a variety of ways. The Spirit has been at work for 2000 years, not just for a couple of hundred early on and a hundred more recently. Today's "movement of the Spirit" is tomorrow's "remember when churches used to . . . "

iMonk on Letting the Church Be Wrong

Great thoughts by Michael Spencer on churches that are too right for their own good.

American Syncretism

I was a missions major in college. We talked about the importance of expressing Christianity in culturally appropriate ways. After all, Christianity in South America need not look like Christianity in the United States. The process of tailoring Christianity to a particular culture we called "contextualization."

Contextualization especially comes to the fore when it comes to worship styles. Should missionaries translate western worship songs into native dialects, or should they encourage nationals to compose their own worship in their own style? Contextualization encourages the latter. Every missionary has to be conscious of contextualization.

You can even see contextualization in missional churches in the United States. Mars Hill in Seattle may be an example of a church contextualizing itself to the indie-rocker youth of urban Seattle. Willow Creek may be an example of a church contextualizing itself to the corporate-ladder boomers of suburban Chicago. (See below for why I say “may be.”)

Another thing we are conscious of in missions is "syncretism." Syncretism is contextualization gone wild--when you take blatantly non-Christian elements of a culture and try to shoehorn them into Christianity.

For instance, polygamy is a huge challenge for contextualization. Polygamy is acceptable in many cultures. What does a missionary tell a new convert who has 2 wives? Divorce one? Only sleep with one? What if both wives have children? Do you kick one set to the curb? Does Christianity allow for polygamy? How does 1 Corinthians 7 apply?

However one chooses to answer that question, most would agree that it is wrong for an already-converted Christian to marry a second wife, even in a polygamist culture. That would be syncretism, as the New Testament advocates monogamy.

So, the challenge of missions is being "contextual" without being "syncretistic."

I am reading The New Shape of World Christianity by Mark Noll. It's a great book about how American Christianity compares to global Christianity. Ours is an age of a post-Christian West and a post-Western Christianity, and there is no reason for us to assume that American Christianity is normative.

In the book, Noll points out the challenge in identifying syncretism in other flavors of Christianity. He writes, "The contrast between the West and the non-West is never between culture-free Christianity and culturally embedded Christianity, but between varieties of culturally embedded Christianity." Great point! Just because another culture does something different does not make us orthodox and them syncretistic. It could be the other way around!

So, I have a question for you. Let's imagine for a second that you are a first-century follower of Jesus. Maybe you are even the Apostle Paul. You are caught in a time machine that not only carries you into the distant future (2009), but also lands you in the USA in a typical suburban evangelical church. What practices do you label syncretistic, and what do you label contextual forms of orthodox Christianity?

James Dunn on the Appeal of the Early Church

In chapter 30 of Christianity in the Making, James Dunn tackles the issue of Paul and his churches. Specifically, he seeks to indentify how people in the first century would have categorized this new group called a "church" compared to the existing social groups of the time. Dunn compares the church to associations, cults, schools, and synagogues and concludes that the church had similarities and differences to all of these groups.

At the end of the chapter, Dunn has a great section on what would have drawn people to the church as opposed to other contemporary groups. He lists nine reasons people would have been drawn to the early church:

1. The transformative power of Paul's message. People's lives were being changed as a result of their encounter with God in the early church.

2. Striking experiences of the Spirit and of power. God was at work in new and amazing ways in the early church. People were getting healed, demons were being exorcized, and the poor were being provided for.

3. The promise of eternal life. The Christian hope is one of resurrection from the dead.

4. The draw of union with a man who conquered death. Jesus stood out as unique among men.

5. Religious devotion. People are always looking for a serious religion. Christianity provided this without demanding judaizing.

6. The completeness of the religion. Christianity is a sound faith that adequately answers many of mankind's most difficult philosophical and religious questions.

7. Good food. Many of the early Christians were poor and would have looked forward to the communal meals.

8. Community. Then as now, people struggled with loneliness and anxiety. The church provided them with a sense of belonging.

9. Openness to members of varying social status. The church was a place where Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, rich and poor could all eat and fellowship together.

These are great insights from Dunn. How many of these could be said of our churches today?

Evangelical Untouchables 3 on iMonk

Michael Spencer has posted the third post in the Evangelical Untouchables series.

This time we were asked about converting and baptizing people of other denominations. How do we respond when someone from our church "converts" or gets baptized at another church? Do we try to convert people from other denominations?

The topic came out of one of Michael's recent experiences. A guy who used to be an elder at his church "became a Christian" at another church and was (re-)baptized. Michael says that the guy showed all of the evidences of being a Christian while he was an elder at his church. Is his (second) conversion legitimate? Is what that church did even acceptable?

Evangelical Untouchables 2

iMonk has posted the second discussion in his Evangelical Untouchables series. This discussion was about how the "seeker" movement has affected our worship. You can see my response and that of the other untouchables here.

How the Inner-city can Save the Suburbs

I had a great lunch meeting with some people from the Northwest Leadership Foundation yesterday. Duncan Wilson, Kris Rocke, and Ron Vignec joined me at this Thai restaurant on the MLK in the Hill-Top area of Tacoma to talk about ways that Believers Fellowship can develop a relationship with the city of Tacoma. What a conversation! Duncan is the director of Sound Youth Counseling, a ministry that offers masters-level counseling to the youth of Tacoma for sliding-scale fees so that no one is turned away. Ron is a Lurtheran pastor at a sweet inner-city church in East Tacoma and he also works to raise awareness about the different "associations" within the city of Tacoma. Kris works for NLF, specializing in urban youth ministry. He trains leaders in the city to better understand the urban context both in America and worldwide.

Our conversation revolved around how suburbanites can get involved in the city without doing more harm than good. We all recognized a couple of things about our world. First, we agreed that something is wrong with our socio-economic system in which people in Gig Harbor and East Tacoma can live so close to each other and yet live such radically different lives. He agreed that the Gospel compels us to right what is wrong in our system. Second, we agreed that building real, meaningful relationships is the best way to "help" the city. For instance, Ron mentioned that food is always a need in the city. It's one thing to set up a food bank where people can come and get groceries. It's another thing to have food available and then bring it to people's homes and share their lives. While the former might provide some temporary relief, the latter is working toward a solution to the problem. As long as the suburbanites continue to view city folk as charity cases or problems-to-be-solved, they will make the situation worse rather than better. Only where there is a give-and-take in a relationship can there be meaningful growth.

I appreciated what Ron and Kris were getting at, but I had to ask them their thoughts on this issue from my perspective. I said:

"What does all of this mean for me? I live in Port Orchard. I work in Gig Harbor. I get up every morning, drive to Gig Harbor, work my job, and then return home. I rarely go to Tacoma, even though my job is only 11 miles from downtown. I recognize a disparity in the living conditions between the communities in which I live and work, and in the inner-city community, but I don't have any meaningful contact with inner-city folks on a daily or weekly basis. How, then, do I try to be a part of the solution rather than the problem? Do I just focus on Port Orchard, since that is my community? Do I try to build relationships in the city with people whom I otherwise wouldn't see? (That seems a little artificial to me.) What do I do?"

Everyone recognized the problem, and we dialogued to come up with a solution. The following conversation is paraphrased:

Kris: "Everyone whom I've ever met that moved from the suburbs to the city said that the move was healing for them. There is something about living in the city that is therapeutic. Suburbanites need to discover how the city can help them, not just how they can help the city."

Ron: "In the city, you can't hide your problems. If you have a drug problem, you might have to rob/shoot someone to pay for your habit. Then the story goes all over the news and everyone knows about it. You can't hide your problem. In the suburbs, you can hide your problems. The problems in the city and in the suburbs are the same, they are just easier to hide in the suburbs."

Matt: "There is a real problem in our suburban culture with people learning to be real with each other. I've heard suburbanites described as 'strangers living hospitably amongst one another.' We've created this system where failure is not an option. Sure, people work hard and they succeed, but they are also pressured to conform to a culture of success. Every now and then, someone snaps, and everyone wonders, 'How could that have happened in our community? Why didn't anyone see this coming?' In reality, there are hundreds of people an inch away from snapping, but you wouldn't know it by looking at them because they have learned to play the game."

Kris: "Maybe the city can help the suburbs by teaching people how to grieve. Maybe when suburbanites are confronted with people who can't hide their problems, they will be more willing to own up to their own shortcomings."

Matt: "Wow. Sounds like the church."

We need to build relationships between the city and the suburbs, but these relationships need to be give-and-take, not just us going dowtown to solve poverty.

Random Musing on Evangelical Culture and the Future

Sometimes I wonder if I am a non-conformist to a fault.

I read a lot of "liberal" stuff, subscribe to a kind of postmodern epistemology/hermeneutic, subscribe to Sojourners, and sympathize with a lot of Roman Catholic and liberal protestant ideas. Sometimes I get the feeling that there are some at my church who wonder if I am a liberal or, worse yet, emergent. At the same time, I went to Cedarvile University and Dallas Seminary, I believe in "inerrancy," and generally take a conservative position on almost every theological issue. Most people on the emerging church blogs would probably call me a fundamentalist.

Can't we all just get along?

I read a lot of the emerging church literature and I agree with most of it, but I still find myself an outsider. I think that the evangelical church in America has some serious problems and is in need of a major overhaul. I am a child of the late seventies/early eighties, raised in public school, and cannot help but think like a postmodernist. It's who I am. (Interestingly enough, I did not approach the postmodernism issue as a modernist evangelical trying to speak the language of the culture, but as a postmodernist realizing that I did not have to conform to the dominant worldview of my evangelical tribe.) However, while postmodernism has led a lot of evangelicals toward the left, it has solidified my position on the right. I no longer feel the need to have to justify my crazy beliefs--they work for me, which is all anyone can say about their beliefs.

I get upset sometimes when I read the emerging blogs because they portray the people who mentored me as ungodly dinosaurs who are only interested in head knowledge to the detriment of following Christ. Nothing could be further from the truth. I know these guys; and I know they love God. At the same time, one of the reasons I did not persue a PhD is because I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to get a job at a conservative seminary. I know my eschatological beliefs proclude me from teaching at either school from which I graduated. That hurts, too. It's kind of like there is a line in the sand. You have to be either a left wing fruit nut with no systematic theology and an axe to grind about American consumerism, or a right wing stiff decrying the evils of narrative theology or the New Perspective on Paul. What about the people who believe that there are right and wrong answers, but who are open to the idea that some of their own answers might be the wrong ones, and who, at the same time, want to see us getting out into the world to transform it?

Here is my question. Is there room in the future of evangelicalism for the postmodern fundamentalist? By this, I mean the person who rejects anyone's claim of absolute certainty regarding any metanarrative, and recognizes such assertions as little more than power plays, but whose own views are really conservative. I hope so, because that is what I am starting to feel that I am.

Separation of Church and State

There has kind of been a renaissance of interest in social justice among American evangelicals over the past few years. For the past 20 or so years, evangelicals have stereotypically been interested only in issues such as abortion, God in school, laws against homosexuality, and regulation of the media. Typically they have been fiscally conservative and voted Republican.

The tide seems to be changing when it comes to you younger evangelicals. Most young people seem to be more interested in the issues that the previous generation surrendered to the Democrats and "liberals" (environmental issues, racism, etc.). I tend to fall somewhere in the middle.

Anyway, with the presidential election upon us, I have been thinking a lot about what the church's role should be in politics. A church cannot endorse a particular party or candidate at the risk of losing their tax-exempt status, but individual Christians have often been very vocal in national politics to try to rally others around their candidate.

Generally, I have ben very turned off from these movements. It seems like they do more harm then good. You mention groups like the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition and most people just roll their eyes. There is a real distatste in this country for groups trying to "legislate morality" by pushing their religious agenda at the polls. Now, with younger evangelicals typically taking a more leftish stance on a lot of issues, these groups are even more suspect--they're pretty much ridiculed in most "emerging churches." I have tended to agree--the evangelical alliance with the Republican party is a bad idea and the marriage between the two has led to more problems than solutions.

However, in the last few months I have started to question this judgment. I was reading A Testament to Freedom, a collection of sermons, letters, and essays written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (one of my heroes), and I came across a letter he had written while staying in America. Bonhoeffer was used to the German system where church and state operated together so that pastorates were government appointed. He noticed that Americans took pride in the notion of separation of church in state, and he wasn't sure that this was a good idea. He said that when the church separates itself from the state, it loses it's influence to make change. In other words, the church in America is emasculated from making any real change in social issues. (This is what Hillary Clinton was getting at when she said that Martin Luther King, Jr. did a lot for civil rights in America, but it took Lyndon Johnson to enact into law the things that King preached. Without the state's intervention, the church's cries for justice would have been just noise.)

I think that Bonhoeffer was on to something. One of the main aspects of my job is getting the church involved in the community around us. I believe that God has special concern for the poor and disenfranchised and that it is the church should be leading the way in standing up for social justice. But how do we do that in a politcal system in which we have no power to make real change? We can continue to alleviate the symptoms of poverty with things like soup kitchens, but we will never be able to solve the causes of poverty without intervening in politics.

So, all that to say that I am second guessing whether the Christians-turned-politicians in the religious right were that far off of the mark after all. Even if I disagree with a lot of their policy decisions, I can't criticize someone who decides that they want to put their faith to action in a way that will be able to generate real change.

Maybe the church needs to form a new organization that does not line up with the Republicans or the Democrats, but with the Gospel. Maybe we need to be more vocal in challenging the Republicans to hold corporations accountable for their actions and the wages they pay their workers. Maybe we need to challenge Democrats to see abortion as a social justice issue. Maybe we need to challenge both parties to find a way for all Americans to afford basic health care.

Regardless, at least we need to vote.